


tall tale

by orphan_account



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Community: comment_fic, Experimental, Free Verse, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-10
Updated: 2012-05-10
Packaged: 2017-11-05 03:26:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/401937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>You'll invert the world to follow me.</i> <a href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/338410.html?thread=59884778#t59884778">Prompt.</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	tall tale

Tell me a story. He looks at you. His face levels flat as the table  
of blueprints, fingerprints. Awhile it'll kill you, cobwebs over the triptych  
of your man here in dream city. There in the eighth country in six days,  
spinning so fast you're not sure if his throat makes you dizzy, there  
in the limbo where the punishment for suitcase stains and lungs like lace  
open under your knuckles is never surety if he'll be here tomorrow.  
Or it'll be someone else. One more life scrawled across his collarbone and  
he'll be someone else.

About yourself, you say too loud, and hope for not another voice  
to memorize melisma over your name. Not other hands stop-red  
with your blood. Not a life you haven't lived, falling into a shrug  
in his arms, the maps of you together in the day, in the dark  
dashed haphazard across his veins. You trace the blotch in your eyes  
to remember, I know the story of this one. Mine and yours. Could  
live it again under wire and what is a story, a blotch over his arm  
to a discotheque lives changed quick as beats, to his body a bridge  
orange and green. To the xylophone of his sounds, the Cadbury sweet of  
the girl next door, sobs in neighbors' beds and bed a Bastille  
under siege as the ceiling barrels in. The ceiling protects you from  
your childhood monster, you purveyor of lucid dreams.

You thought you'd be safe in the machine. Hide from him,  
live a paragon. Teach blond toddlers with no concerns but  
the whereabouts of cookies and cream. Go somewhere where he'd have  
a story about dictators and their limber daughters you hadn't heard.  
Go where even he, all people, wouldn't see you.  
Go until some festival in the desert makes even him less bleak;  
go through the art world and the legitimate world and world at your feet  
secure in knowing he is whoever, and you are only adream.

But he'll invert the world for you. Like a blue moon he follows  
like your niece's drooping beagle, like knives, like debts  
he breaks lives to get to you. So you can bite him like Communion  
bread like you'll ingrain every moment in his skin  
not with ink but teeth. Here you are, your fingers, your tongue  
flensing him to the bone, and here are the bones of it:

When real are the queerest dreams, there's a power in  
saying listen, I'll tell you my story, quiet  
and fucking listen, my heart;  
the people in these stories will never dream again.  
The only story with you is dead before we sleep.


End file.
